A Little Revenge

I am unable to understand how anybody could try to minimize the prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib prison. We're supposed to be better than that, and yet every day there are more intimations of widespread cruelty by some of our troops. The guilty parties are endangering the troops in the field who are serving honorably, not to mention increasing the likelihood that the U.S. will be unable to get a stable government in place anytime soon. There should be an extensive investigation into who those guilty parties are, since responsibility clearly goes higher than with those who are seen in the photos.

For some reason, during the questioning of Secretary Rumsfeld last week, Senator Lieberman prefaced his support for an apology with this statement: "I cannot help but say, however, that those who were responsible for killing 3,000 Americans on September 11th, 2001, never apologized. Those who have killed hundreds of Americans in uniform in Iraq working to liberate Iraq and protect our security have never apologized." I don't know if this is some sort of "it's bad, but not that bad" sort of rationalization.

The Senator also mentioned the lack of an apology from "those who murdered and burned and humiliated four Americans in Fallujah a while ago". It's interesting that the Senator brought that up. The victims of the Fallujah atrocity were private security contractors. Such contractors are all over Iraq - even at Abu Ghraib prison, questioning detainees. According to news reports, tens of thousands of Iraqis have been detained during sweeps by American troops, especially in pockets of Sunni resistance - like Fallujah.

There is no excuse for the horrible attack on the four contractors. Not only that, but I don't think anybody has come up with an explanation for the attack, either. Okay, so here's the crazy theory of the day. Is it possible that security contractors were targeted because of the actions of their fellow contractors, who engaged in the abuse of detainees? And if so, is that a sign that this whole abuse scandal will have far greater repercussions?